Ships of the 13th Century

[Ken]

I know that I ask a lot of questions about matters of the 13th century, but as you are all so knowledgeable, I'll carry on!!

It fascinates me how they managed to travel so much, covering distances on foot and horseback that we, today, would balk at in our cars and planes!

One of the means of transport, the ship, has not, from my research at least, thrown much light on the ships they used to travel from England to France and also from for example, Aigues Mortes in the south of France, to Cyprus and on to the Holy Land, along with with their horses!

I have looked up the 'Cog' and the 'Caravel' and the galleys, some based on the Viking long-ships, but I find it hard to find pictures of these ships and to imagine their size and how many men (and women?) they could transport and the conditions on board (preserving food and water, cooking, hygiene, toilets, etc!).

Anyone have previous knowledge of 13th century sailing??

Ken

[Volgadon]

Small and uncomfortable. Miserable.

[Ken]

Oh! Very droll, Volgadon!! Have you any experiences you might like to share with us?

[Volgadon]

Toilets are easy, either in a bucket or straight overboard, though try that in anything but a calm sea.....
Horses are unfit for riding straight off the boat.
Water was limited, food was preserved, such as pickled fish. I imagine that fresh food was procured at ports.
Imagine being in a small, cramped space for weeks, always rolling up and down, stuffy, malodorous, people snoring, damp and nasty weather, not a fun experience. BTW although later, watch the Richard Lester Musketeers the passage to England should give some small idea.
I've been on a tall ship from Liverpool to Portsmouth, I was the only passenger who didn't suffer from sea sickness. I've also sailed and rowed small boats on the Sea of Galilee and the Mediteranean.

[EC2]

Perhaps there are documentaries available on DVD or books - the Tim Severin ones spring to mind - about travelling in replicas of these vessels. Recently a Viking ship replica was sailed from ummm....Norway I think to Orkney and there was a documentary about it. The Histoire de Guillaume le Mareschal has a reference to ship's biscuits - that's cool. Other than that I think you just have to read around in general. There is Conway's History of the Ship - Cogs, caravels and galleons and The Age of the Galley for an overview, but a lot of the time you just have to pick up stuff as you go along. For example, Anne Hyland's Medieval Warhorse from Byzantium to the Crusades discusses horse transports in shipping, Peter Spufford's Power and Profit, The Merchant in Medieval Europe discusses merchant shipping. Margaret Wade Labarge's The Medieval Traveller will give you more details. And so on and so forth.

[Margaret]

Sea travel, despite obvious hazards, was much preferred to overland travel where possible, because it was so much faster. With our cars, buses, trains and planes, we tend not to realize how difficult overland travel was in medieval times.

A couple of reference books:

The Sailing Ship: Six Thousand Years of History by Romola and R.C. Anderson. This was published in 1963, but is an excellent reference, with lots of pictures. Chapter V, "The One-Masted Ship in Her Prime," is devoted to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Ships and Seafaring in Ancient Times by Lionel Casson. This deals with an earlier period, but 13th century ships were still fairly primitive, so it might be useful for getting a sense of what it was like to be aboard a ship similar to what people were sailing in the 13th century.

Good luck!

[Ken]

Thanks Margaret, EC and others.

Have looked up your references andd links and they are very useful. I wonder if the nobility who travelled in these (pretty small) ships fared better than the lowly squires, grooms, etc?

[SarahWoodbury]

Not if they got seasick! I get sick in any boat, short of a rowboat on a pond.

Sorry. That's all I can think of when I think of spending even the little time it would have taken to cross from England to France. I have never been as sick in my life as I was crossing the English channel on the ferry from Folkstone to Dieppe. Fritos and M&M's (okay, so I was twenty :)) do not mix, folks. Calais to Dover was much better on the return journey, in a hovercraft instead of a traditional ferry. Imagine my despair if I'd been doing it in 1280!

[Ken]

Not if they got seasick! I get sick in any boat, short of a rowboat on a pond.

Calais to Dover was much better on the return journey, in a hovercraft instead of a traditional ferry. Imagine my despair if I'd been doing it in 1280!

Hi Sarah.

Funnily enough, it was the Hovercrafts that made me the most seasick! The hard bumps from wave to wave along with the smell of (aviation?) fuel, sufficed to set my stomach going. Sorry folks if you are having breakfast reading this!

I often take the ferry from Plymouth to Santander on the Spanish Basque coast, crossing the notorious Bay of Biscay and, as it a 24,ooo ton ship, like most people, I have no problem. However, doing the same voyage in 1280, would be an entirely differnt matter!!!

[annis]

Hi Ken

Yes I'm always amazed at the way people of the past travelled so extensively, given often unpleasant and dangerous conditions whether voyaging by land or sea. As someone who only has to look at a ship to feel seasick, I'm in awe!
A tip from the terminally seasick : make sure you throw up from the side not facing into the wind :)

Here's a picture of a Hansa cog
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3357/3579546363_b07acbd0b0.jpg

[Ken]

Hi Annis,

That's the best picture of a cog I have seen so far! Where did you get it?

I can see that it holds quite a number of people, but where did they put the horses??

[Margaret]

As someone who enjoys a fair amount of solitude, spending a month or two on that cog would not be my idea of a good time! And it's no wonder sailors thought women aboard ship were bad luck - imagine how difficult and awkward it would be to make sure a woman had sufficient privacy from male gawking.

There's a Roman floor mosaic (somewhere in Sicily, I think) that shows elephants being loaded onto or off ships from Africa. Evidently, they just stood in the middle of the ship. You could only put one or two elephants on a ship. If a group with horses were crossing the Channel, more than one ship would be used to carry the whole party, with one or more dedicated primarily to horse transport. I think there's a scene of horses being transported by ship in the Bayeux Tapestry. Images of the complete Bayeux Tapestry are online at http://hastings1066.com/baythumb.shtml. One has to be a bit cautious about interpreting medieval illustrations, because more often than not, they are not to scale. The size of an element in an artwork was usually more related to importance, with kings being drawn larger than commoners, etc.

[annis]

Posted by Ken
That's the best picture of a cog I have seen so far! Where did you get it?


Lol! It's actually came from a ship model box :)

Cogs (http://www.abc.se/~pa/mar/cog.htm) were surprisingly wide and roomy, and some had 2-3 decks. According to the Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_transports_in_the_Middle_Ages) on horse transports in the Middle Ages, in the 13th century two- and three-deck ships could carry 100 horses (or 600 men).However, the need for fodder and water probably restricted the number of horses that could be carried.

Bernard Cornwell gives a good description in "Azincourt" of the process of loading horses onto a ship before Henry V's fleet set off for France:

Also north of the "Heron" was the "Lady of Falmouth" and she was being loaded with horses that were swum out to the ship’s side and then hoisted aboard in great leather slings. The horses rose dripping, legs dangling limp and eyes rolling white with fear, then were slowly lowered into padded stalls in the "Lady of Falmouth"’s hold. Hook saw his black gelding, Raker, lifted dripping from the sea, then Melisande’s small piebald mare, Dell. Men swam among the horses, deftly fixing the slings. Sir John’s great destrier, a black stallion called Lucifer, glared about him as he was lifted from the sea.

There's some info on putting together a medieval fleet in the book
"Ships, Seafaring and Society " (http://books.google.com/books?id=W_7Ao0vWak4C&pg=PA39&lpg=PA39&dq=carrying+horses+on+a+thirteenth+century+cog&source=bl&ots=VSoy1IXSE4&sig=iMCAg-5VermZOdyctZEjzZIzOBw&hl=en&ei=4uMiSon3B9agkQX0s6yMBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#PPA41,M1) by Timothy J Runyan- see pags 41-2

[Ken]

Thanks again Annis and Margaret.

As usual, loads of info and interesting leads. Why didn't I think of the use of the sling to pick the horses out of the water and onto the ship? Seems obvious now!! Ahem!

Ken